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george.james's blog

Thanks must go to Simon Tweed who has tirelessly processed the audio recordings, cleaned them up, sliced and diced them and done all kinds of post-processing to make them into mp3s. The end result is exceptionally good - much better than the kind of quality I'm used to from conference recordings. They are a joy to listen to.

Each session is a separate mp3 file. You can listen to it live on the site or download it to your mp3 player and listen at your leisure.

The presentation slides are been hosted by Slideshare who provide a nice flash based applet that allowed them to be view directly on this site. As an aside, slideshare uses Amazon S3 for its storage and content hosting - S3 was much discussed during the conference.

A nice feature of slideshare is that the audio tracks can be synchronised with the slide presentations. As time permits we will be doing this for some of the presentations. The first, Querying the Web, has already been done. If you want the best possible viewing experience then click the little green play button beneath the slides, sit back, relax and enjoy.

Oh, and one last thing. The nice people at slideshare have picked my Querying the Web presentation as one of their featured slidecasts, which is really cool.

That's pre-conference beer, as in the evening before the conference, not beer for breakfast.

Anyone who is checked in at one of the local hotels and at a loose end the evening before can rendezvous at the Grotto Inn, Monument Hill, Weybridge from about 7pm.

It is within easy walking distance of Oatlands Park Hotel and the Ship Hotel. It's a bit further but still just about walkable from the Oatlands Chaser (Innkeepers Lodge). If you are staying in one of the hotels on the Cobham side then best to take a taxi.

The Grotto has free wifi so bring your laptop and catch up on or email or prepare a lightning talk to give at the conference.

There are at least a dozen decent restaurants within a few hundred yards of the Grotto, so there's plenty of choice for somewhere to eat after you've wet your whistle.

You won't see a Â£350,000 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren in Brooklands Museum, but you might well see one parked outside.

No ... I haven't gone mad and blown the kids inheritance on a new car :) But right next door to Brooklands Museum is Mercedes-Benz World which is some kind of bizarre cross between a car showroom and a theme park.

You'll probably see a few top of the range Mercedes parked up, some Â£¼m Maybach saloons and if you are lucky there will be a couple of SLRs to drool over. And as the McLaren F1 Headquarters is only just up the road in Woking you might even see Lewis Hamilton dropping of his road car for a service.

Mercedes-Benz World is free to visit and is actually just a car-showroom. But they have a test-track with viewing gallery, first class restaurant, quite a few historic cars (Gullwings, etc) and at least one of every production Mercedes model currently available.

So keep your eyes open as you arrive... there's more to see than you might think.